News

Immediately after our 1.0.0 release, we started looking at real world use cases, to see where we could make even more of a difference for WordPress users. We already provide an amazing solution for users who want to roll or modify their own user styles, so we turned our eyes to to the remainder: those users who are locked in legacy themes that can’t support SmartCropped images, or who want to see an immediate improvement without modifying styles.

Version 1.1.0 adds support for focus-based cropping to traditional WordPress cropped thumbnail sizes. Now, when you set a SmartCrop focus point, we also regenerate all cropped thumbnail sizes, to use that focus point. These thumbnails are still traditional, static images, so they can’t take advantage of the responsive control available to SmartCropped images, but they are still a vast improvement over WordPress’ default “center-first” cropping.

Now there’s no development hurdle between you and better images, so get started today, and convert your thumbnails to SmartCropped images whenever you have the time.

The new website is up, the code is cross-browser tested, and the plugin is everything we could have hoped for, so what’s standing in the way of release? All the little stuff.

Polish the Website – Since the site is the primary way to let the world know about WP SmartCrop, we need to be 100% sure it will work flawlessly on many different devices, and that the content is just right.

Complete Documentation – We knew from the beginning that we were releasing as much of a tool for developers, as for end users, if not more. As such, there are a lot of under-the-hood features to document and provide demos and example code for.

WordPress Codex Approval – To be able to push updates to our users and ensure the best experience and widest distribution possible, our code needs to be approved by the WordPress team for inclusion in the WordPress Codex. This involves a code review that we can only wait for

But I want to use it now!

If you want to get moving ahead of the crowd, and start using WP SmartCrop on your site now, the entire codebase is available on GitHub, at the link below. Just keep in mind that this is the bleeding edge code, so you may cut yourself!